For those who are home, and for those who are on the way. For those who support the historic and just return of the land of Israel to its people, forever loyal to their inheritance, and its restoration.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

There was a time when the Left could simultaneously support Israel and the fight for Algerian independence. Not any more. So what has changed?

Part of the answer lies in a rich and thoughtful New York Times article, “The European Left and its trouble with the Jews” by Colin Shindler, emeritus professor at the School for Asian and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Professor Shindler has made a specialism of studying the Left, and in particular, its attitude to Israel.

The article’s starting point is that Jews in France have recently been the targets of vicious and, in Toulouse, lethal anti-Jewish hatred. Shindler charges that the European Left has been reluctant to take a clear stand when the anti-Zionism of Islamist extremists spills over into anti-semitism. To cement the ‘red-green’ alliance on Israel, the Left has had to compromise its liberal principles on women, gays, minorities – a worldview light-years removed from their own.

The 1956 Suez adventure in collusion with Britain and France, and later, its dependency on the US, tarred Israel with the brush of imperialism. Since 1967, the conquest of the West Bank tarred Israel with the brush of colonialism, with the Arab side pointing out ad nauseam the injustice of building ‘Jewish settlements on Arab land’.

There is much worth reading in Shindler’s article, but some aspects I disagree with. Firstly, the point at which anti-Zionism spilled over into anti-semitism dates back, not to the rise of Hezbollah, but to the 1920s, when the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, instigated riots in Palestine. Secondly, Arab supporters of accommodation with Jewish self-determination were sidelined not 10, nor even 20 years ago, but in the first half of the 20th century. The real schism between Arab moderates and extremists took place as the Mufti consolidated his hold over his rivals in Palestine. Later, he was to exert influence on Arab leaders to the point when ridding Palestine of the Jews became a pan-Arab cause.

Lingering doubts that remained about the criminality of the organization frequently called the United States' "largest Islamic charity" [NY Times] ended on Monday. That's when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that it would not overturn an earlier appeal that went against five officials from Holy Land Foundation convicted of illegally funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. That appears to be the final legal avenue open to the convicted men and concludes the case.

For years, in a pattern which to some of us is already familiar, the supporters of the convicts and their lawyers cast the Holy Land Foundation as being, at minimum, the victim of the extreme angst that afflicted the US after the events of September 11, 2001, as well as "an important case for religious freedom, and for civil rights" [The American Muslim]. The group "merely raised money for needy Palestinians", it has been argued, and was never connected to any violence.

America's tribunals of law and fact, one after another, came to a different conclusion. As a result, Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh were convicted on 108 counts in 2008 and will remain in prison serving sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years. Just in passing, a reminder that Mufid Abdulqader is the brother of arch-terrorist Khaled Mashal, "the main leader" [Wikipedia] of Hamas' terrorist operations since 2004.

The Gaza camp in Jordan, near the northwestern historical ruins of Jerrash where the Greco Roman Empire once flourished, was set up by the UN as an emergency measure in 1968.

During the 1967 Arab-Israeli War war, about 12,000 refugees fled from Gaza to this area. It now has a population of about 30,000 Gazans.

Hidden in the outskirts of Jerrash, connected to the rest of civilization by a single neglected dirt road, most tourists have no idea about the camp. Locals are known to respond to visitors' inquiries with a suspicious: "Why do you want to go there?!"

Some tourists wonder if Jerrash municipality wants to keep foreigners out, to hide the dilapidated squalor that is so close to a bustling tourist attraction and well kept city.

Living conditions at the Gaza camp have been described as the worst in Jordan.

Surrounded by an empty desert, its streets are filled with children playing near sewage and trash. The pathways are cluttered with discarded food, old recyclables and other materials, which are burned frequently because garbage collection is unreliable.

Whenever the United States has put serious, sustained pressure on Israel’s leaders—from the 1950s on—it has come from Republican presidents, not Democratic ones…. Despite the Republican Party’s shrill campaign rhetoric on Israel, no Democratic president has ever strong-armed Israel on any key national security issue.— Efraim Halevy, “Who Threw Israel Under the Bus?,” New York Times, October 24

Former Mossad head Efraim Halevy likes Barack Obama and dislikes Mitt Romney. He’s entitled to his opinion. What he isn’t entitled to do is make categorical statements that do violence to the historical record.

I’m teaching a graduate course this semester on relations between Israel and the United States, and one of my purposes in following a historical approach is to fortify my students against people who misrepresent the past for some present purpose. Just the other week, we spent two hours discussing how President John F. Kennedy (yes, a Democrat) put the screws on Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, over Israel’s nuclear end-run. The story has been told at considerable length elsewhere, most ably by Avner Cohen, Zaki Shalom, Michael Karpin, and Warren Bass, so I’ll just recap it here. It’s relevant not only as a corrective to Halevy’s erroneous claim. It’s essential background to the renewed debate over Israel’s nuclear posture that the Obama administration has helped to prompt.

I live in a town where the grocer remembers what kind of sugar I prefer and knows my account number by heart. I live in a town where people on one block share a lawnmower because it would never occur to us that we shouldn’t share. I live in a town where the demand to give is so strong that it’s hard to sign up to make meals for someone who needs because everyone rushes to sign up. I live in a town where people care so much for each other that the loss of one individual is a personal loss to us all. Today our town experienced a personal, terrible loss.

Choosing a community upon our Aliyah ten years ago was not an easy decision. Neve Daniel, found on the ‘wrong’ side of the green line, is part of the Gush Etzion region, a group of small towns and neighborhoods just a few kilometers south of Jerusalem. A suburban neighborhood nestled on a mountain at nearly 1000 meters elevation, Neve Daniel is a modern orthodox enclave of Israelis and immigrants from many different countries. The area had a reputation – well-deserved, I might add – for a great educational system; and with its close proximity to Jerusalem, school choices were almost endless. The educational choices for the kids clinched it for our choice of Gush Etzion. The unbelievably stunning, nearly 360° views from the heights of Neve Daniel, as well as the dry, cool weather, sealed the deal.

This is the community I chose. A place with heart, and a place with soul; a place with stunning vistas, and the warmest individuals. A place whose people will share in your every celebrations as if they were their own, and a place where they will mourn your tragedies, again, as if they were their own. Because they are their own.

Ho hum. A rocket fusillade (two rockets) fired from Gaza by one of the Hamas-controlled enclave's numerous hyper-armed terror groups crashed and exploded in southern Israel around 3 this morning, Wednesday.

This has happened in one or another of the Israeli regions north, east and south of the Gaza Strip almost two hundred times in the month drawing to an end today. With rare exceptions, these attacks go unreported, other than in parts of the Israeli media. This is not because of their lack of terrifying impact on hundreds of thousands of Israeli - men, women, children - especially children - living, working and going to kindergarten and school in the areas under attack. It's because so few people are interested in knowing the ongoing nature of the terrorists' daily assaults on our society and our country.

A well-established person leaves Paris, the city which can offer you anything you want, moves to Eilat and reports for volunteer service at the local fire department.

This is the unique story of Frank Levy Louie, 55, who just loves the State of Israel and wants to share his tremendous knowledge with it.

Louie has an impressive 35-year experience in firefighting. He began his career as a volunteer in the Paris Fire Brigade. Ten years later, when he was promoted to the rank of captain, he was officially recruited by France's fire service, and continued to climb up the ranks until he became a colonel.

As part of his job, he oversaw 42 fire departments in northern Paris with 3,200 firefighters. During his service, he says, he led an operation to extinguish a Concorde aircraft that caught fire in France, and left to Haiti with a rescue operation following the powerful earthquake that hit the country.

His love for Israel is so strong that during the first Gulf War, he initiated a visit to the Jewish state and volunteered at the Tel Aviv fire department while the city was hit by Iraqi missiles. During the Second Lebanon War, he flew over again and volunteered at the fire department in Haifa, which was attacked by Hezbollah rockets.

Kasim Hafeez grew up hating Jews and hating Israel. Now the 28-year-old British Muslim of Pakistani origin travels the world explaining how and why he has gone from a hater to a lover of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

His personal journey of going from chanting “Death to Israel” in London’s Trafalgar Square to speaking about how he became a proud Zionist kept the Herald editorial board enraptured for much longer than our allotted hour on Thursday.

“To put it very bluntly, I was an anti-Semite,” the 28-year-old Nottingham-based university administrator said.

Whereas his grandparents merely parroted relatively benign and absurd conspiracy theories about Jews — that they controlled America and were behind Coca Cola poisoning polar bears in Antarctica (where no polar bears even exist) — his father was more direct.

“My father praised Hitler as being brilliant,” admitted Hafeez. “Hitler’s one failing,” according to Hafeez’s father, “was he didn’t finish off the job of killing all Jews.”

But back then, mosques in Britain were not political or radical. That started to change after Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988, followed by the war in Bosnia and ultimately the Islamist Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

In 2000, Hafeez travelled to Pakistan and got swept up in radical Islam in a big way, believing that Muslims had to rise up and fight the “evil Jews and help his oppressed Muslim brothers and sisters.”

Upon returning to the U.K., Hafeez said he got further radicalized. He pulled out his iPad and showed photos of books, CDs and DVDs — including ones put out by the terrorist group al-Qaeda — that he bought openly at South Asian shops all over the U.K.

But his radicalization really ramped up upon attending university, where he studied political science, and with the help of his professors, turned virtually every class discussion towards how the Jews stole Muslim Palestinian land and were the root of all evil in the world.

After 9/11, Hafeez and his radical friends started attending “Stop the War” protests, which would “instantly turn into Israel hatefests.”

He and his Muslim friends made a point of befriending “middle-class white kids from Oxford” for their PR value. “We didn’t really see them as friends because we abhorred everything they stood for,” he admitted.

Eventually, all of his activism didn’t seem enough and Hafeez started saving money, hoping to return to Pakistan to attend a jihadi training camp. “Thankfully, it didn’t pan out that way,” he said, with a chuckle.

Hafeez’s plans were scuttled by reading The Case for Israel, by Alan Dershowitz. He read the book with the intent to “prove it all wrong.”

What he ultimately found out instead was that he knew virtually nothing about the region — that Jews, for instance, had lived in Israel for thousands of years and that a Palestinian state never actually existed. As he tried to prove the book wrong, the opposite started to happen:

“In hindsight, I never actually gave a real damn about Palestine, I was just obsessed with hating Israel.”

Starting to suspect the cause he was prepared to die for was a colossal lie, Hafeez fell into a depression. When he got better, he decided to travel to Israel to see for himself in 2007.

The right to resistance against oppression, occupation and military aggression is recognized in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It also is confirmed in the Taif Accord.

Hezbollah anoints itself as “the Resistance” and unilaterally grants itself the right to be armed on the pretext that Israel is still occupying parts of Lebanon’s territory and is violating Lebanon’s airspace.

Therefore, if foreign occupation and violation of border integrity justify the right to bear arms, to be organized in an armed resistance movement and to be entitled to decide without consideration for anyone how, when and where to make use of these weapons, by the same logic, other groups may or should organize themselves into “resistances” to defend Lebanon from the attacks by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Furthermore, maybe resistance organizations should be necessary to liberate Lebanon from Iranian occupation.

For indeed, Lebanon is under Iranian occupation. Hezbollah’s doctrine and its leaders’ statements identify the party as being part of “The Nation” rather than Lebanon. Also, Hezbollah does not hide the fact that it is an integral part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Furthermore, the party is financed and armed by Iran, and unequivocally and unashamedly proclaims that it takes its orders from Iran’s Supreme leader of the Islamic Revolution. Moreover, the Lebanese state has no free access to the zone occupied by the Iranian militia, and the Lebanese air force is bared from flying in the area under the threat of being shot down. Hezbollah does not act as a Lebanese entity but as an Iranian militia staffed by Lebanese nationals.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

To the cheers of assembled delegates, the Third International Solidarity Conference of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, which met in Pretoria earlier this week, endorsed the call for a campaign of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targeting the Israel. A lone German representative who stood up and challenged the prevailing wisdom that Israel is the reincarnation of South Africa’s apartheid regime was roundly dismissed by the chairman of the ANC, Baleka Mbete, who said that she herself had visited “Palestine,” where she’d discovered that the situation is “far worse than apartheid South Africa.”

This is not the first time that a senior member of South Africa’s leftist political establishment has made that exact point. In a particularly noxious speech delivered last May, the Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu asserted that the Palestinians were “being oppressed more than the apartheid ide­o­logues could ever dream about in South Africa.” Tutu’s co-thinker, the Reverend Allan Boesak ­– best known for his conviction for defrauding charitable donations from the singer Paul Simon and others — has also declared that Israel “is worse, not in the sense that apartheid was not an absolutely terrifying system in South Africa, but in the ways in which the Israelis have taken the apartheid system and perfected it.” And in an interview earlier this year, John Dugard, a South African law professor and former UN Rapporteur, approvingly referred to “black South Africans like Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu and others who have repeatedly stated that, in their opinion, the situation in the Palestinian territory is in many respects worse than it was under apartheid.”

At times, these thunderous denunciations from ANC figures have descended into open anti-Semitism. In 2009, Bongani Masuku, a mid-level ANC operative, was found guilty by South Africa’s Human Rights Commission of deploying “hate speech” after he announced that any South African Jew who did not support the Palestinian cause “must not just be encouraged but forced to leave.” In his defense, Masuku might have pointed out that he was merely echoing similar sentiments to those expressed by Fatima Hajaig, the former deputy minister of foreign affairs, who claimed that “the control of America, just like the control of most Western countries, is in the hands of Jewish money, and if Jewish money controls their country then you cannot expect anything else.”

Anchor: Where is the problem today of this Left. Why doesn't the public, you know, doesn't go for it. Doesn't run to it.

Rubinstein: Look, there were many problems. The central problem was that the Left promised that in exchange for territorial concessions there would be peace. The Palestinian leadership and part of the Arab world did everything they could to prove them wrong. One cannot ignore the part of the Palestinians in the failure of the Israeli left.

And there was another thing.

The Israeli left did not succeed in proving to the Israeli public that they are both doves and patriots...

The Left can succeed, in particular in the period Israel is going through - very difficult times, only if it proves that it is also patriotic - is also for Israel - and also denounces inhuman and anti-liberal things from the Arab side.

Israeli entrepreneur Nimrod Elmish is positive that the idea for a wheelchair made out of cardboard has crossed many people’s minds. But it took an Israeli team to make it a reality.

“Welcome to the startup nation,” says Elmish, an expert in leading early-stage startups to maturity. “We have seen you can build agriculture in the middle of the desert. We recognize a major problem in the world and we find the best solutions. We can always find a solution – you just need persistence and patience.”

With great feedback and global interest in their first venture – recyclable cardboard bicycles – Elmish and automation expert Izhar Gafni of I.G. Cardboard Technologies have quietly added the cardboard wheelchair project to their operation. It’s made of less than $10 worth of durable recycled cardboard, plastic bottles and recycled tires.

“Anything that you make out of wood, plastic or metal can be made out of our material,” Elmish tells ISRAEL21c. “Cardboard bikes, wagons, wheelchairs, chairs for airplanes or trains, toys, even cars. We’re not building cars yet. But I say, ‘yet.’ We believe that nothing is impossible and anything is possible.”

Recent comments by the head of the Muslim Brotherhood [MB], the winner of the recent elections in Egypt, and others, provide yet another jolting reminder of the ruling party's plans for the Middle East.

With the presidency under its control, members of the MB apparently believe they must oversee a comprehensive process of Islamization of the Egyptian state and society, before they can turn their sights on their final goal, the creation of a pan-Islamic super-state that will encompass the region, and then wage war on Israel.

In an October 19 Egyptian Channel One television broadcast, made available by the invaluable MEMRI, Egypt's President can be seen deep in prayer. The prayer session included a sermon by Futouh Abd Al-Nabi Mansour, a cleric in charge of religious endowment in the Matrouh governorate of northwest Egypt. Mansour called out to the worshipers: "O Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters." [Note: The call takes on blatant anti-Semitic tones rather than hiding behind the usual code word of "Zionists." – the Editor]. The call to destroy the Jews did not disturb Morsi's prayers.

Sheikh Mohammed Badie, chairman of the MB, signaled his movement's intentions, calling for a "jihad for the recovery of Jerusalem," and described religious warfare against Israel as a "duty for all Muslims."

Badie's comments underscored the disappointing fact that, unlike the old Mubarak regime that was a cornerstone of regional stability, the new Islamist-governed Egypt opposes peace with Israel and is joining the rejectionist camp of the region's fundamentalist forces, promoting unending hostilities, and seemingly seeking to lead the radical bloc.

By issuing calls for jihad, Badie has taken Egypt a step closer toward adopting, as Egypt's foreign policy, Hamas and its ideology.

I’m tracking Hurricane Sandy, on the Internet, calling my sisters in New York. My husband and son are stuck in Texas, can’t make it back to New York for their flight to Israel.

I think of all those millions of people in the East of the US who face the stormy weather. And then I remember Sderot and the Israeli communities around the Gaza Strip and Beersheba and Ashkelon who are, even now, being attacked. In America you sleep in a shelter only when there’s a gale force hurricane. In Israel sleeping in a shelter has become a somewhat ordinary event. Almost every day lately missiles are fired into our southern areas: more than 80 were fired last week before the ceasefire — which apparently didn’t hold.

On Sunday, I spoke on the phone with a friend in Beersheba who told me that he had to go, there was a siren, he had to move to a shelter. A woman I know from a small community in the South participates in an art therapy program in Jerusalem run by our foundation, the Koby Mandell Foundation, named after my son who was murdered 12 years ago by Palestinian terrorists. She suffers from trauma as a result of her home being hit by a Katyusha rocket a few years ago. She didn’t suffer physical injuries but has suffered from PTSD since.

Last night at Yafiz, Sha'ar Binyamin, an Arab customer asked me if I remember him. I was surprised and asked if he remembered me. The conversation was in English.

"Of course, last visit I shopped here many times. Then I had come from Saudi Arabia."

That seems like an apropos introduction to this picture I snapped a couple of weeks ago:

The license plate is hard to see, but it's Jordanian. The car was ahead of us at Hizme/Jerusalem "city line." I've decide to call it that and not "border."

A sizable percentage of our customers in Yafiz, a moderately priced "clothing for the entire family store" in Sha'ar Binyamin, just north of Jerusalem is Arab, Muslim Arabs. We also have Christian Arabs, lots of Jews and also some of the Christian Zionist volunteers from North America who do volunteer work, primarily Jewish agriculture in the area.

Like all businesses, the business comes in waves. Due to the Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha, and the beginning of winter for all, it has been more like a tsunami. At least that's how we, the hapless staff, felt at times the past few days. No doubt that morning shift will think the store had been hit by hurricane winds, because by the time we closed to customers, our energies were more depleted than the shelves. We didn't do a total clean-up.

The Facebook page for Fatah in Lebanon has posted this picture of a mother dressing her young son with a suicide belt. Palestinian Media Watch has documented the ongoing glorification of violence and Martyrdom by the PA. This picture was posted on the Fatah site together with an imaginary conversation between the son who is being sent to his death and the mother encouraging it. "Why me and not you?" the child innocently asks his mother, who answers that she will continue to have more children "for the sake of Palestine":

"My mother dressed me in a strange belt (i.e., a suicide belt).I asked her: 'What is this, mother?'She said: 'I will put it on you and you will go to your death!'I said to her: 'Mother, what have I done that you want me to die?'She shed a tear that hurt my heart and said: 'The homeland needs you, son. Go and blow up the sons of Zion.'I said to her: 'Why me and not you?'She said: 'I will stay in order to give birth to more children for the sake of Palestine.'I kissed her hand and said to her: 'Keep it up, mother, for you and for Palestine I will kill the impure and the damned.'"[Fatah-Lebanon's Facebook page,posted Sept. 3, 2012, accessed Oct. 28, 2012]

The Facebook page states that it is "the official page of Fatah's Information and Culture Commission in Lebanon," and is linked to from the official website of the Fatah Information and Culture Commission (www.fatehmedia.ps).

Ignore the confusing English. The source is a Persian-language news channel translated from the source Arabic and then rendered into English by a team of salaried propagandists.

But there's no mistaking the intent of Ismail Haniyeh, the man who heads the Hamas regime that dominates the Gaza Strip and "one of two disputed Prime Ministers of the Palestinian National Authority". Source: This past Saturday night's edition of the Iranian news channel, FARS [online]

TEHRAN (FNA)- Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh underlined his nation's irrevocable stance against Israel, stressing that Palestinians will never ignore even a single span of their land. "We (Palestinians) will never overlook even one span of Palestine's soil because Palestine is an endowed land and no person, leader, organization or group is entitled to the right to ignore this land," Haniyeh said in a meeting on Saturday with the members of 'Miles of Smiles 17' aid convoy and an Indonesian delegation visiting Gaza. "Israel has no future in the Palestinian lands and our motto is that we will never recognize the Zionist regime," he said.

Monday, October 29, 2012

On October 20th Israel intercepted the latest in a series of vessels seeking to break its maritime blockade of Gaza. This ship, the MV Estelle, carried five European parliamentarians and a former Canadian member of parliament. The ostensible purpose of these visits, mostly by European “activists,” is to draw attention to the horrendous, horrible, impossible isolation and the desperate humanitarian conditions there, all imposed by the Israeli blockade.

This week The New York Review of Books, a fashionable left-wing periodical, told a different story. Nicolas Pelham, who writes primarily for The Economist and The New Statesman, noted the recent visit of the Emir of Qatar (bearing $400 million in gifts) and described Gaza this way:

The wire story was apparently based on an AP story that was published early yesterday, which reported the following about the slain Palestinian man:

The identity of the dead Palestinian wasn't immediately known. The Israeli military said it targeted a militant squad that had fired a rocket at Israel.

Yet, shortly later, and long before the LA Times went to press last night, the casualty's identity was known. Many online news outlets reported throughout the day that the killed Palestinian man was a Hamas fighter. As Reuters reported in a story posted yesterday on the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency Web site ("Israel kills Hamas fighter in south Gaza"):

The ever-informative Elder of Ziyon blog has this report today on measures being taken by the Israel Defense Forces today to protect ordinary non-combatants on the far side of the fence in the wake of the round-the-clock rocket fire into Israel from Gaza.

The flyers, spread from Rafah to Deir al Balah, tell Gazans to stay at least 300 meters away from the border with Israel. It also urges them to stay away from rocket launchers and terrorists. The leaflets say that the terror groups pose a threat to people's lives, their families, their children and their property. The papers further said that that terrorists are firing rockets from populated areas into Israel, saying it will pursue the launchers.

I am praying in my little corner. The wind is swaying my flowers just enough to soothe me, while the teeny birds on the tree branch above call out their friendship to one another in the delicate peeps. If it were a normal day, only my rival - that bee who believes this is HIS garden - would have the ability to bother my total serenity.

But even in this perfect weather in my perfect corner, I am too troubled to find my own inner peace - even for 20 minutes. I am thinking of our brethren in the South who are being bombarded by Gaza, about the deafening booms around them, about the shaking of the ground beneath their feet, about the children who wish they were in their mothers' arms and about the mothers who are pacing the floors waiting for the bus to return them home.

I am thinking of my family far away who have had to evacuate their home in the face of a hurricane. We pray for rain, and in New York today, rain is their enemy.

The breeze is so gentle in my garden today. But there is turbulence in my mind. May Hashem protect our brethren and good people everywhere.

Link:http://voices-magazine.blogspot.com/2012/10/dissonance-in-my-mind.htmlUpdates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook..

What does Copenhagen have in common with Dearbornistan and Berlin? An excess of Muslim diversity and when diversity means followers of a religion that spews hate and engages in routine violence… then there’s no room for anything that might make the Religion of Peace break out in another orgy of violence.

“On 9-14-2012, Dearborn Fordson High School principal called the police on me for driving with 2 Israeli flags on my truck.

“The Dearborn police were one car behind me when this student threw a bottle on my windshield. The police did not stop the student, but instead stopped me for 30 minutes asking me why I would display Israeli flags on my truck.”

German police officials in the cities of Duisburg and Düsseldorf, located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, prohibited pro-Israeli supporters from displaying Israeli flags.

During an anti-Israeli demonstration organized by the radical Islamic group, Milli Görüs, which attracted 10,000 protesters last Saturday in Duisburg, two police officers stormed the apartment of a 25-year-old student and his 26-year-old girlfriend and seized Israeli flags hanging on the balcony and inside a window.

Not today, but from last week: Israeli home'visited' by Gaza's terrorist thugs

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
29 October '12..

It's just after ten in the morning here on a bright, warm Autumn morning. A delightful, breezy day.

Unless you are very determined, and even if you feel very connected to events, it's near impossible to get a meaningful sense of the sheer terror of living within range of the rocket men of Gaza. The thugs of the Hamas-dominated enclave are armed to the teeth with a rocket arsenal that numbers in the tens of thousands... and growing. The sheer volume of the ongoing attacks is mind-numbing, and therefore of so little news value that it's ignored - up until the point when the Gazan Palestinian Arabs get lucky and kill someone. And even then, awareness is minor unless Israel's defensive measures exact innocent lives and the reporters and editors go back into teeth-gnashing mode.

These come on top of the terrorist (meaning entirely indiscriminate) rocket attacks from earlier in the morning. We reported on those ["29-Oct-12: Wild, turbulent night and not because of a hurricane"] a couple of hours ago. And they will surely be followed by more.

Perhaps things will get a little better now, in the wake of the flying visit to Gaza this past week by one of the world's wealthiest individuals, the Emir of Qatar.

Haniyeh: Qatar visit breaks Gaza siege

Published in Maan News Tuesday 23/10/2012 (updated) 25/10/2012 11:12 GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on Tuesday said the visit of Qatar's emir to the Gaza Strip had helped lift Israel's blockade of the enclave. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani on Tuesday was the first head of state to enter Gaza since 1999 in a visit that broke the isolation of its rulers Hamas. "You are today, by this visit, declaring the breaking of the unjust blockade," Haniyeh told the Qatari leader in a speech at the site of a new town to be built with Gulf money. "Today we declare victory against the blockade through this historic visit," he said. "We say thank you, Emir, thank you Qatar for this noble Arab stance ... Hail to the blood of martyrs which brought us to this moment." [More]

That visit, and the huge financial gift that Qatar says it is going to hand over, represents a potentially important turning point in the way Gaza is perceived. Two of the more influential writers at Haaretz, Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, offered an analysis in the newspaper's Friday edition that has not gotten the exposure we think it deserves.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

The Los Angeles Times' article today about a purported increase in attempts by Jewish worshipers to pray on the Temple Mount unnecessarily exacerbates an already tense situation with a provocative, misleading headline, and by publishing false Palestinian accusations as fact. As of this writing, the story by Jerusalem bureau chief Edmund Sanders appears on the top item of the Los Angeles Times home page and is accompanied by a bombastic, misleading headline:

The headline is provocative and misleading given that the site in question, the Temple Mount, is not simply a "site sacred to Muslims," but is also Judaism's holiest site, as the article itself makes clear.

Furthermore, the front-page blurb does nothing to clarify the fact that the site where Jews are seeking to pray is Judaism's holiest site. It says: "Israeli police and Muslim officials say prayers at the Temple Mount-Al Aqsa mosque site are a provocation. One rabbi responds: 'What is provocative about a person wanting to pray?'"

Those readers who bother to click on the headline in order to read the story will come to a page with a more balanced headline. It states "More Jews praying on site also sacred to Muslims" (emphasis added). The "also" makes clear that the site is holy to Jews, an essential point that the majority of Los Angeles Times Web visitors would miss.

[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:What is the meaning of "full protection?"Prime Minister Netanyahu: " Until today, residents of the south in the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip enjoyed protection, full protection up to 4.5 kilometers. The addition of Iron Dome batteries affords protection beyond seven kilometers – but the seam remains. In the intermediate seam, there was protection for educational institutions. Today, we will decide to complete this full protection for all residents of the south...""Full protection" = if you are inside your house there is an area inside the house that is reinforced so you are protected from being killed if you are inside your home?What about if you are outside?The people protected by Iron Dome live in areas that are hit by airborne weapons that can be intercepted by Iron Dome. But if you live within 7 kilometers Iron Dome cannot intercept the incoming strike either because the system does not have enough time or because the weapon (for example mortar) is not something that Iron Dome can intercept.So is it really "full protection" for a citizen to be in a situation that he can still be killed if he is outside of his home (or perhaps outside the reinforced portion of his home?)Clip and save for drawing borders: Any Israeli community within 7 kilometers of a Palestinian state will be an open target. "Full protection" would only mean safety for citizens hiding inside their reinforced rooms. So much for any workable borders for an independent Palestinian state.]

‘Will there be a siren?” and “Should we go to the shelter or outside?” These were the two questions I was most frequently asked by friends and colleagues ahead of last week’s major earthquake drill.

Each time I answered (“no” to the first question; “it depends which is closer” to the second) I couldn’t help but think how very Israeli the situation was. Israelis are expected to know what to do in an oh-so-oxymoronic “routine emergency.” It’s the unexpected emergencies (like tremors) that we have trouble with.

Having to figure out whether this is a “the ground’s trembling under my feet” type of potential disaster or “there are missiles falling from the sky” situation – an act of nature or an act of war – is a routine no one wants to get used to.

The well-oiled Palestinian PR machine (and we know where the oil wells are located) constantly churns out an image of a people under siege.

Writing on a day when I first checked how friends in the South are coping with an increased missile barrage from Gaza, permit me to say that if anyone’s under siege it is those residents of the Negev, Ashkelon and elsewhere who have to stay close to their shelters – very close, because, depending on where they live, they have between seven seconds and half a minute to grab their children, older relatives and pets and get to safety. As the cynics note, even Olympic sprint legend Usain Bolt wouldn’t be able to do it from a distance of 200 meters, let alone a mother of three from Sderot, an old lady in Beersheba or a young boy in Ashkelon.

When I received a press release from Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel gleefully informing me that “New Yorkers will protest at Carnegie Hall with music, songs, chants and street theater against the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) and its complicity in Israel’s apartheid policies against the Palestinian people,” I actually laughed. After a day glued to news reports of missiles and mortars being lobbed at my friends’ homes and worrying about the soldiers – children of friends – serving in the area, it wasn’t hard to think of the planned protest as a bad joke.

If it did anything, the landmark visit to Gaza by the Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani on Tuesday exposed a slew of widespread regional fallacies.

First looms the contention of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh that the visit ended the political and economic blockade of Gaza. This is vitally important, coming as it does days after another ship hired by radical leftists, the Estelle, attempted to sail from Europe to Gaza to break the blockade that, as Haniyeh himself attests, does not exist.

Hamas and its global coterie of cheerleaders cannot have it both ways. There either is a blockade or there is not. Truth cannot be adjusted to whatever they find convenient at any particular juncture.

One fact stands out incontrovertibly. The emir entered Gaza via the Strip’s border with Egypt. Those members of the international community who bewail the supposed “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza should finally admit that the Strip is not surrounded and enclosed by Israel. Whatever demands are made of Israel can just as vehemently be addressed to Egypt.

Given that the premise used to blame Israel and to build a case for Gazan hardship does not stand up to scrutiny, it follows logically that no humanitarian emergency exists in Gaza.

Consequent to this is the persistent presentation of Gaza as a territory still under Israeli occupation, despite the fact that there has been no Israeli presence there since the 2005 disengagement. Gaza has shown itself to have evolved from the Palestinian Authority’s annex into what is for all intents and purposes a state in its own right. This de facto state is furthermore a warlike entity, armed to the teeth with all variety of weaponry, all directed against Israel. Gaza is hardly the vulnerable “concentration camp” that spinmeisters allege.

The visit has also exposed PA President Mahmoud Abbas as a fraud in his claim that he represents the entire Palestinian population with an unshakable mandate to negotiate in its name. If Abbas represents anyone, it is at most Fatah’s Ramallah fragment. He does not speak for Gaza.

I've been reading about the airstrikes in Sudan. I first read about it as part of a threat from Khartoum, that they reserve the right to strike Israel back. It was, according to the Sudanese, a foregone conclusion that Israel was responsible. My first reaction was a snicker that combined two thoughts simultaneously, "yeah, like they can reach us" and "sheesh, something explodes and they blame us."

I stand by the first response, but retract the second one. The more I read, the more I think it could have been us - that it should have been. There were in fact two attacks - one previously that wiped out a convoy of vehicles loaded with arms for Gaza; and then last week, an arms manufacturing plant owned by Iran.

I find it rather ironic that here the Sudanese are, allowing weapons for terrorists in Gaza and Iran to be manufactured on their land, and they have the nerve to complain when the target of those weapons preemptively strikes and obliterates the factories.

One of the things I love about Elie (whose name will apparently soon be changing to Eli if I can remember to type it that way according to the preferences of the amazingly wonderful young couple...and what is wrong with Elie?...well, never mind...) - so one of the things I love about Elie is his ability to analyze, to keep up to date and digest the information he accumulates. In this case, it is part analysis and part reading the news.

One of the papers Elie read over the weekend showed two maps - a map marking the distance from Israel to Khartoum, and a map showing the distance from Israel to Iran. Significantly, the distance to Khartoum is quite a bit further and so, in this airstrike, Israel is sending another message to Iran.

‘Survey: Most Israeli Jews would support apartheid regime,” the headline in Haaretz screamed earlier this week. If that were true, it indeed would have been a worrying development. But the information below will demonstrate that the article contains some of the most blatant anti-Israel lies published in recent years. And Gideon Levy, the one and only – who is read more in English than in Hebrew — was awarded the task of explaining the survey to the whole wide world.

The result? Israel is apparently not merely on the way to becoming South Africa. It has already turned into South Africa. The lie has been making waves the world over, spreading like wildfire. The goal has been achieved.

It’s not easy to chase down a lie that has already gained traction worldwide. But it seems there is no escaping the attempt, at least. So we’ll bring the facts — just the facts — and let them speak for themselves. Hopefully, someone is listening.

The Nobel Committee noted that “the dreadful suffering in World War II demonstrated the need for a new Europe.” Who understood that better than the Jews, millions of whom had been exterminated in Germany and Poland with little response from the rest of the world? But as they staggered out of what remained of postwar Europe, the Jews drew conclusions about their future that immediately put them at odds with Europe’s forward-thinkers.

European intellectuals decided that the nation-state was a model that needed to be relegated to the ash heap of history; the Jews, in contrast, decided that the only thing that would avert their continual victimization was creating a nation-state of their own.

Thus, the Jewish state, without question the world’s highest-profile example of the ethnic nation-state, emerged onto the international stage just as Europe decided that the model had run its course. That is why historian Tony Judt called Israel “an anachronism,” urging that it be dismantled.

Widespread European disdain for Israel, while certainly fueled by both the enduring Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Muslim immigration to Europe, was thus all but inevitable.

Yes, Israel affords civil rights and freedom of worship to its many minorities; but it makes no attempt to deny that there is one specific people, one particular narrative, one religion to which is it most centrally committed. The State of Israel is, to paraphrase Lincoln, “by the Jews, of the Jews and for the Jews.” How could those who labored to create the European Union not consider the very idea of a Jewish state anathema?

This convicted killer is serving 67 life sentences in an Israeliprison for multiple murders. He built and delivered a bomb hiddenwithin a guitar case that took 15 innocent lives including our child's.He is Abdullah Barghouti. A significant part of his monthly salary for October 2012 was paid, literally, by this blog's readers.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
25 October '12..

Douglas Murray has a powerful op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal Europe dealing with something we have puzzled over and written about several times over the past years. How is that sharp-as-a-pin politicians, serving as ministers in European governments, sign off on documents that transfer many millions of Euros, Pounds and Dollars into the bottomless pit of the Palestinian Arab jihad, and then forget they did it? Or deny they did? Or demonstrate that they never actually fully understood that they did it?

They personally, with their own pens and their own fingers, fund hatred-driven terrorism that allows evil men and women to kill members of a different religion. And then they pretend that it wasn't them, it wasn't the money they sent, it's a misunderstanding, it's not my fault.

Are we greatly simplifying a complex situation? We're a family whose child was murdered by members of a group that has benefited for years from payments of the kind we're describing. How many people do you know whose child died by murder? It concentrates your mind greatly.

Here's Douglas Murray, associate director at the London-based Henry Jackson Society, a think-tank, writing under the headline "Palestinian Terrorists on the Payroll" [online at the WSJE site]:

...Many British taxpayers, struggling to pay their family's way through a recession, might rightly wonder why their money is going to pay as much as £2,000 a month to people serving the longest sentences—those who have targeted Israeli buses and other civilian targets with suicide bombers, for instance. That is higher than the average wage in nearly all of Britain. You might be forgiven for wondering, if you were a struggling teaching assistant in the North of England, why failing to tick "suicide bomber" on your careers form should have left you so much worse off than a terrorist in the Middle East...

Friday, October 26, 2012

One of the reasons the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement has had trouble gaining adherents is that everyone knew the movement would never just target Jews. It would begin with Israel, but surely expand to anyone deemed insufficiently hostile to Israeli companies.

And soon enough it did so, targeting American companies such as Caterpillar, which makes the type of tractor that hit Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist attempting to shield terrorists’ weapons smuggling tunnels from the Israeli military. Since Corrie was attempting to aid those who wanted to kill Israeli civilians, you would think a “social justice” movement would spare Caterpillar its ire. But that’s not how BDS works. And so it is not surprising that such a movement has found a stalwart ally in the United Nations, an organization dedicated to protecting the world’s worst human rights violators while relentlessly targeting the Jewish state.

When the UN went looking for a special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories who embodied the world agency’s values, they settled on Richard Falk, a 9/11 truther who compared Israel to Nazi Germany. Falk hasn’t disappointed, and his latest stunt was to expand his brand of economic warfare against the Jewish state to America. Yesterday, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Falk’s belligerent threats against American companies:

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About Me

I visited Hevron in November 2000 after the outbreak of the Rosh Hashanah War to see what could be done to assist in the face of the growing daily attacks on the community. After returning to work for the community in the summer of 2001, a bond and a love was forged that grows to this day. My wife Melody and I merited to be married at Ma'arat HaMachpela and now host visitors from throughout the world every Shabbat as well as during the week. Our goal, "Time to come Home!"